A skyline mired in mediocrity

In Beijing, the capital of the 21st century’s leading superpower, work is nearly done on an ethereal new edifice named the Leeza Soho. The 46-story tower features a serpentine sunlit atrium, the world’s tallest, designed by the legendary Dame Zaha Hadid.

Here in New York, our most famous atrium is the one inside Trump Tower. It’s a faux gold-plated and black-mirrored Tony Montana-fever dream that, architecturally, is bested by the Astoria Grand Manor wedding hall across the East River.

Hadid, the 21st century’s most influential architect, continues to be the woman behind the world’s most progressive and provocative projects more than a year after her untimely passing. As Soho China CEO Zhang Xin said, “China attracts the best talent from around the world. It’s important to work with architects who understand what the next generation requires.”

But what does it say about New York that such futuristic visions come to fruition in cities like Beijing rather than here in what was once the world’s architecture capital?

The dearly departed 20th century was definitively America’s. Cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Miami emerged from relative obscurity to become global epicenters. New wealth and prominence propelled a new civic architecture that veered wildly between the gaudy and the grand.

The list of 20th century New York City architectural masterpieces is longer than one of Donald Trump’s red ties.

That glorious reign now appears over, as New York is invaded by a rash of mediocre-looking apartment towers masquerading as money-laundering schemes for the global elite. And still the city stubbornly clings to the hollow marketing slogan of the Greatest City in the World like pedestrians clinging tightly to $500 Canada Goose parkas while scurrying under One57’s Siberian shadow.

Here in modern-day Manhattan, milquetoast monstrosities like the Lucida apartment tower on E. 86th St. and Lexington Ave. are built without any regard for the neighborhood.

The Lucida could have integrated a new entrance for the 11th-busiest subway station into its ground floor. But no, Manhattan needed yet another street-front bank branch, and so the two inadequate IRT-era subway staircases outside the Lucida were left in place. Thus pedestrians must endure the kind of brutal squeezing that prompted California’s foie gras ban as they traverse a sidewalk that’s about 4 feet wide.

Hadid’s tower embraces, rather than rejects, its surroundings by organically rising from a subway station that will house two brand-new lines.

Beijing’s subway has grown from only having two lines in 2002 to become the world’s second-biggest after Shanghai. In that same time, New York has only built three stations on the Q’s Second Ave. trunk and the 34th St. 7 station, at a combined cost of $6.85 billion.

And Hadid’s tower, like all her projects, is both monumental yet warm and inviting. The soaring atrium isn’t just there to achieve hollow records like Carmelo Anthony filling it up in yet another lost Knicks season; its sinuous shape will allow natural light to permeate throughout the building.

Its vibrancy is literally a world away from the stultifying new towers that are stocky blots on New York’s once-iconic skyline.

Federal highway engineers know that straight and monotonous roads are deadly, so, as Tom Vanderbilt explains in his book “Traffic,” “road designers will often introduce subtle curvatures.” The same idea applies in architecture, where monotonous design results in deadly rectangular bores, like Rafael Viñoly’s middle-finger-to-Manhattan 432 Park Ave.

Herzog & de Meuron’s forthcoming 56 Leonard St. lamely contravenes the rectangular paradigm by stacking floors at contrasting angles in a style derived from the children’s game Jenga.

Albo Liberis, the firm behind Williamsburg’s William Vale Hotel, put more effort into its marketing mumbo jumbo than the design itself in saying “the site prompted an unpacking of what engaged us most about Brooklyn’s emergent physical urban-scape (and) the truss form acknowledges and plays off other physical characteristics of the neighborhood.”

The hotel’s eye-searing bright white truss work is actually more evocative of the little-loved Manhattan Bridge farther south. And as a ginormous gentrification symbol it’s a tad impolite to invoke Williamsburg’s working-class past.

There are a few ambitious projects that are exceptions to the anodyne architecture plaguing New York; Jean Nouvel’s “vision machine” at 100 11th Ave., Frank Gehry’s elegantly flowing IAC Building and Santiago Calatrava’s overpriced but grand Oculus WTC hub.

But projects like Hadid’s are physical proof that New York’s preeminence is ending. A tree may grow in Brooklyn, but the future is being built in cities like Beijing.